Barcode Producer vs. free barcode software
Why should you invest in a Barcode Producer software license if there are so many free barcode generators available online? Well, we can be short on that one: free barcode generators either deliver extremely poor quality barcodes, offer only the worst output file formats when it comes to readability or a very small number of barcode symbologies — or all of those simultaneously.
Consider this screenshot — that wasn’t edited in any image or photo app — of an online barcode generator that wants you to buy their Windows barcode app.
And now take a look at Barcode Producer’s output in the bitmap image format it supports, TIFF, exactly because that’s the only one that is capable of good enough quality.
Most of these services offer an online barcode generator as a teaser to make you buy their software. Take a look at the next screenshot. It shows the available file output formats.
This online generator only outputs to bitmap formats and the HTML code below the form clearly shows its barcodes are actually meant to be used on a web page. Web pages are not the best of candidates for barcodes that you want to use in a sales environment, such as EAN or UPC barcodes. If you want to be sure an on-screen barcode can be scanned properly, there is a special symbology for that — the QR Code — which you can scan even if it’s displayed on a monitor.
To round up the overview of online barcode generators, consider the bar width in the above screenshot — it can be set to 1 pixel. It’s going to be very difficult to read a barcode with a scanner like the IntelliScanner Pro if you leave the barcode width at an almost indiscernible 1 pixel.
And when you think about it, how credible is a company who offers a service that lets you create barcodes that can’t even be scanned with an industry-standard barcode scanner? There are online generators that offer more robust capabilities, like this one that sets the bar width at a minimum of 6 pixels and offers mils and mm as well.
In addition, this one lets you opt for the SVG file format, which is way better than GIF or JPEG. However, you should really take notice of the paragraph above the generator panel. It clearly states it’s intended to showcase the capabilities of an SDK. The generated barcodes are not intended to be used for production, sales, logistics — real-world — usage.
Online barcode generators have other shortcomings as well. For example, they are rarely printable directly from the online generator. They lack batch creation capabilities, there’s absolutely no guarantee the barcodes will be readable by standard barcode scanners, etc, etc. Even with those that seem to be better than the others, some settings are more or less fake — like the 600dpi setting you can opt for in the last example.
In short, by using online and free barcode generators, you could be losing a lot of time and effort trying to generate a barcode that works. Worse yet, if your designer uses such a barcode generator and you don’t demand they use an industry-standards compliant barcode creation app like Barcode Producer, you might end up with unreadable barcodes on the printed packaging, books, magazines, or whatever else it is they’ve designed for you.
Barcode Producer for Mac/PC creates perfect barcodes for retail packages, labels, books, packages, and everything else. Download